This gadget does exactly as promised: it looks like a thumbdrive (sort of) and fries the circuitry of any computer it’s plugged into. It’s made from camera flash parts, is charged with a standard AA battery, and delivers a 300V zap of DC destruction to the port for all your USB-murdering needs. Note that this […]

The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

Holiday shopping is in full swing, and the Striiv Touch is one of the best gift ideas I’ve landed on. Its simple design works for females and males, and its wide range of features makes it suitable for even the non-fitness enthusiasts in your life.Unlike traditional fitness trackers, the Striiv Touch also acts as a smartwatch. It […]

I stand in solidarity with the rotting stiff corpse of BH Hopkins. Myself, being of unsound mind and a still a lying, thieving, cheating, selfish, unsharing, unloving, unkind, disloyal, dishonorable and unfaithful (isn’t that covered by “disloyal”?), yes I voted Republican every time and YES I’m glad I joined the Neptune Society.

No. You can be “disloyal” to friends, cohorts, and country while keeping your pants on. It’s generally understood that when someone is accused of being “unfaithful” that the betrayal is of a romantic partner with whom you vowed to be sexually monogomous.

I love this one from Hollywood cemetery in Richmond, Virginia… There is a fellow buried between his wife and mistress and their mutual headstone reads, “kept” and “satisfied”. I have a pic of it somewhere but in the meantime here is one I found on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/montanapets/6270634296/

If you ever find yourself in Richmond and are a history buff of any stripe, definitely take tour… its a beautiful cemetery with loads of great history and character.

I spend a lot of time around genealogists, and can tell you many of us would love to find something like this. Paper trails are very tedious. We find a lot of NPEs (non-parental events) but usually no backstory to help us figure out how the people at the time dealt with the situation. Or an individual family member who all of a sudden moves thousands of miles away — often to a new continent — and we don’t know if they were looking for work, had a rambling spirit, or were trying to stay one step ahead of the law. To actually see proof that an ancestor was known to be a jerk would be fabulous. Usually, the sands of time have worn down any personal story. A lot of tombstones with only a start and end date on them, nothing else.

We’d like to believe we descend from conquerors and explorers, but ancestors like Bernard P. Hopkins are more representative of most people’s ancestry.

The graveyard where my father’s buried dates back to the 1700s, which isn’t uncommon back in the northeast US. Most of the graves that I found notable were children under 1 year old (way too many of them), and a friend from college who’d disappeared on her way home from music lessons one day (we still hitchhiked back then) and wasn’t found until months later after spring thaw.